Matt Schreiber didn’t come to Carolina expecting to become a private wealth manager.
In fact, his degrees, a bachelor’s in history (’03) and a master’s in teaching (’04)
are more often associated with less financially lucrative careers.

But after teaching in Sumter, South Carolina, the New Jersey native returned home
to work with his father in the family business, WBI, a provider of institutional and
private wealth management.

“My dad called and said he needed a good sales guy,” Schreiber recalls. “And he said,
‘If you can’t hack it, I’m going to have to fire you.’ ”

Clearly, the younger Schreiber was able to “hack it,” raising more than $500 million
in assets for WBI and becoming the largest single sales producer in firm history.

Today, in addition to his role as president of the company, overseeing WBI’s day-to-day
operations, he also is the firm’s chief investment strategist responsible for market
and economic analysis, portfolio strategy and product design and development.

“One good thing about my history background was I could do research really well,”
Schreiber says. “I also knew a lot about what had happened throughout recorded history
broadly enough to understand different periods and their economic drivers.”

When Schreiber arrived at Carolina, he started as a music major and spent a season
in the marching band. Then he went to a smaller college for one semester to play soccer,
but came back to Carolina and was a walk-on with the track team, running the 3,000-meter
steeplechase event.

“I am competitive,” he says. “On the track team, I was competing every day just to
stay on the team with world-class, Olympic-caliber athletes.”

He says his whole experience at Carolina, in the classroom as well as on the track,
helped him be successful while still fairly early in his career. He has endowed a
scholarship at Carolina to support track athletes.

“I am very grateful to have the experiences that I had there,” says Schreiber, winner
of the university’s 2018 Outstanding Young Alumnus Award, which honors a graduate
younger than 40 who has achieved extraordinary success and significantly set themselves
apart from their peers.

Schreiber says he still uses many of the skills he learned at Carolina in his daily
work.

“Investors left to their own devices frequently make the wrong decisions for the right
reasons,” Schreiber says. “So I’m still teaching, whether it’s teaching our clients
about investing or teaching our employees about where we’re going and how we’re going
to get there.

My Carolina Alumni Association has named the recipients of its 2018 Alumni Awards.
Register online for a forum, luncheon and awards presentation with President Harris
Pastides Oct. 26 from noon to 2 p.m. in the University of South Carolina Alumni Center.
Learn more about our award winners: